The last couple of weeks, I’ve got rigorous about making the agent refactor old code. We’ve removed, moved, consolidated, reordered loads of cruft. It has made the code much tidier and reduced the chance that the next feature will build on top of cruft.

E.G. over time we’d gained two client-side caches of related server state. This started out as two different parts of the same model, because we couldn’t get all the data we needed from one microservice and had to merge in the client. Over time, more and more features used both caches for different aspects of related processes. At some point one of the microservices changed so as to return all the data in one call. The update to consume that kept both caches, adding code to sync them, because so many parts of the code were using one as a fallback for the other, so they both looked “necessary”. Because they were separate, and “live” sometimes they’d go out of sync after the initial load. Worse: the consumers alternated about which cache was treated as the fallback, making it very hard to see that either might be redundant. Eventually I noticed they were filled by the response to a single call. We all know paying back tech debt never gets prioritised, so I rolled the payback into two feature tasks, and just took longer about them.

My employer expects we use LLMs and provides some budget, but it’s not enough to use even Open4.7 or GLM-5.2 on every task. I do the bulk of my work with Composer 2.5. It’s quite good for “going forward” on smallish tasks and it’s written most of my code this year. It’s possible smarter models would spot these refactorinh opportunities and action them proir to building features or fixing bugs. But I wouldn’t know because I can’t afford it. I’ve never seen even a 4.8 era model spot a refactor and plan to do it prior to a “new build”.

I’m pleased I’ve spotted these trends and started to build the habit of (telling the agent to)“refactor to make the change easier”, but my percieved productivity will go down and I risk the ire of my leaders.